🇪🇸Pedro Sanchez Fights For Survival
Will the European Parliament elections bring down Spanish Premier Pedro Sánchez? or will he overcome the odds yet again?
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To say that Spanish politics has been agitated over the last six years would be an understatement. Spanish politics, traditionally dominated by a polarised two-party system, underwent a multi-party mirage due to the economic crisis. The mirage appears to be over, and Spanish politics are returning to its old duopoly, albeit more polarised.
According to a recent study by Edelman for the WEF, Spain is, together with Sweden, the sole country in Europe to be classified as “severely polarised” owing to the entrenched nature of its polarisation. In this regard, it can be comparable to the US (which scores the same polarisation value). Only Latin American democracies, like Argentina or Colombia, rank higher.
The Situation
In this context, after three consecutive regional elections (Galicia in February, the Basque Country in April, and Catalonia in May), the fourth and last election of the year is coming this week, as Europeans from across the continent go to the polling booths to vote for the MEPs that will represent them for this next five years.
Currently, the PSOE relies on the support of not just a plethora of small left-wing regionalist or nationalist parties (including the controversial EH Bildu, which integrated people from the former Basque terrorist group ETA), but also centre-right nationalists from the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV-EAJ) and the less reliable Catalan separatists, Junts, led by self-proclaimed exiled leader Carles Puigdemont.
This reliance on parties with wildly different economic agendas has already led the Pedro Sánchez’ cabinet to backtrack on several important policy announcements like the Housing Law, which had to be withdrawn once it became clear that neither the PSOE nor the centre-right nationalists were willing to compromise.
However, despite this, Spanish politics no longer resembles a game of policies or politics, but of culture wars that have become increasingly personalised – in the case of the left, focused on the person of Pedro Sánchez.
Between 24 and 29 April, the Socialist Prime Minister kept Spain in a state of suspension and expectation after his surprise announcement on 24 April that, following a judge’s decision to investigate whether his wife was involved in some shady affair that was raised by a far-right organisation based on some press clippings, he was going to take five days for self-reflection and decide whether he would resign or not.
This came in the context of a Spanish judiciary that is increasingly paralysed by the inability of the two main parties to agree on the composition of its governing body– the CGPJ – and the increasing tendency towards using the judiciary in partisan ways – fishing for ideologically aligned judges (with half of Spanish judges having ideological affiliations) to open judicial inquiries to discredit political opponents.
Now, whether Sánchez intended to resign because he thought a red line for him was crossed, or he cynically exploited the inquiry into his wife to force a change in the conversation and regroup his followers as he successfully did last year in May, or both, is impossible to know.
What we do know is that whatever he had planned, it appears to have worked in changing the conversation, as well as his political future. At the same time, the government has admittedly continued to struggle on the legislative side of things – other than the Amnesty Law that Catalan nationalists are clamouring for.
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What to expect?
Over the last few months, polls have been tightening in Spain, and the commanding PP lead that existed a few months ago has become a small 1–2-point lead over the PSOE, with the big parties’ natural allies (Vox for PP, Sumar and Podemos for PSOE) roughly obtaining the same number of seats.
Since the beginning of the year, and after both the left-wing mobilisation stirred by the demonstrations in support of Sanchez (a true Peronist move) during his self-reflections and the PSOE’s exceptional result in the Catalan elections in May, what was expected to have been a big defeat for the PSOE on 9 June might end up becoming a draw.
The PSOE campaign has been run tightly. They have a good candidate in Teresa Ribera – with a strong profile in Madrid and Brussels. Meanwhile, the People’s Party (PP) chose Dolors Montserrat as their top candidate but has focused its campaign entirely on domestic issues, railing against “sanchismo” and amnesty. Moreover, their lead candidate has been eclipsed by party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the Madrid regional premier, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
As for the smaller parties, Vox has run a decent enough campaign. However, the party is still reeling from the fight between its more neoliberal wing and its national-populist wing, where the latter has won the internal push decisively, but not without making noises about defections in the press. It is for that reason, for instance, that MEP Mazaly Aguilar was not included in the party’s list.
This might all benefit the alt-right influencer Alvise Pérez, with his populist ‘The Party is Over’ party, which is now projected to earn him a job as an MEP and some much-needed judicial immunity from future libel cases.
On the left, Sumar has run a lacklustre campaign after lacklustre results in Galicia, Basque Country and Catalonia. The party is just not managing to work as one, and the perception is that Yolanda Díaz is not the cohesive leader people expected her to be, with an increasing likelihood that the coalition will break down.
Meanwhile, Podemos, after splitting from Sumar, has improved its results, from 1 to 2-3 projected MEPs, through strong campaigning on a pro-Palestine platform that in the last weeks has veered into calling for peace in Ukraine by not arming Ukraine, a sort of pro-Russian by default faux-pacifist perspective.
If polls are correct, then the PP will obtain some 22-23 MEPs, the PSOE 19-20, Vox 6-7, Sumar 4, Podemos 2-3, the various nationalist and regionalist coalitions 4-5 with Alvise Perez’s get-out-of-jail party getting one or even two MEPs. Considering all the upheaval of the last five years, the PSOE would not lose any MEPs, while the PP pretty much would absorb the former voters of the liberal Ciudadanos party. Vox would double its representation too but, polling at 10% is a far cry from a not-too-distant high of 15%.
Of special note perhaps is that former Ciudadanos MEPs and MPs are running in 5 lists: Juan Carlos Girauta for Vox, former Cs party leader and MEP Adrián Vázquez Lázara and two more liberal MEPs with the PP, Jordi Cañas in the rump Cs list and then other former liberals are running in the Cree (Believe), a small social-liberal splinter led by former MP Edmundo Bal, and in Izquierda Española, a small pro-unitary state left-leaning party that has gathered a lot of interest in the right-wing press.
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Potential Consequences
On 3 June, Alberto Núñez Feijóo announced that, for him, the PSOE not winning the EP election would be a referendum on Sánchez and indicated that he would submit a no-confidence vote on the government and look everywhere for support – including his until now greatest enemy, Carles Puigdemont.
Under the Spanish Constitution, a government can only be toppled if an alternative PM can be agreed. This means that Junts, Vox and the PP would all need to support Feijóo (or a third party) as PM, and it seems very difficult to bring together these 3 elements. Vox already announced that they would be willing to bring down Sánchez with Junts’ support if the latter did not ask for anything in return.
However, what it might be able to do, is highlight the loneliness and difficulties of a left-wing cabinet that co-exists with a legislature where the right has a majority.
Politics makes for weird bedfellows, and Puigdemont wants to be Catalan premier at all costs, now that the Amnesty Law is approved, he does not need to support Sánchez anymore, especially if that means letting Salvador Illa be the Catalan premier in what might be the first Catalan government formed based on the left-right axis, and not the unionism vs. separatism in 14 years.
But absent such a change, Sanchez will continue to limp along with a weak government faced with a very difficult legislature – it is almost impossible that this legislature will last four years having just crossed the constitutional threshold whereby a snap election can be called.
Which is something that will weigh on Pedro Sanchez’s mind.
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Thanks for the overview. I am surprised that there is no larger green party in Spain